← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Finding Your Perfect Audience With Targeted Meta Ads
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of.
- [00:40]
Jordan Cooney
Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Akvila DeFazio, who is the President at Akvertise, which specializes in digital marketing services offering a wide range of solutions to help businesses increase their online presence and and reach their targeted audiences effectively.
- [01:03]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's a h r e f s.com.
- [02:20]
Jordan Cooney
AWT yesterday, Agvil and I talked about creative strategies for designing scroll stopping social media ads. Today we're going to continue our conversation by discussing finding your perfect audience with targeted meta app. Okay, here's my conversation with Agvila DeFazio, president at Akvertise. Agvila, welcome back to the Voice of Search Podcast.
- [02:44]
Akvila DeFazio
Hi Jordan, thanks for having me back.
- [02:46]
Jordan Cooney
Pumped to have you back today. Yesterday though was an outstanding episode. For our listeners who don't get enough background on how creative should be built, what signals you should look at, what data is available to you to improve the way you think about creative. It's an outstanding episode to go back to and listen through. And I fundamentally believe that for, for all of our listeners, whether you're on the content SEO side, the tech SEO side, these are important foundational aspects or topics that are going to help us become more effective as the discovery world changes for all of our consumers and our audiences. So thank you to Akvila for yesterday's episode. And today we're going into targeted Meta ads. I want to, I want to start off with a controversial topic. Our president here in the United States recently made some pretty bold claims that Meta is really the social media company that we should be really watching out for. I'm paraphrasing his words, but this is in the backdrop of, of TikTok being banned in the United States. And essentially, to play into his argument here, less competition means. Means that there's a risk to consumers. So I want to get just your, your general sense on where Meta is today, the effectiveness of Meta as a whole platform, both paid and organic, in its values to businesses, brands, small business owners, and how they can be utilizing this platform for, for their audiences.
- [04:20]
Akvila DeFazio
I think I'm still unpacking what's transpired in like the last three to four days because so much has happened. It's like TikTok got banned and it got unbanned and we have the new president. And then, you know, Zuckerberg made some statements last week. So I feel like there's a massive shift of people going other places. Like there was a huge uplift in Blue sky registrations. You know, there's people are on X. Like it's everywhere. From the paid standpoint, it's doing really well. I don't think Meta's going anywhere. It's in a good spot. I think politics aside, I'm talking like kind of politics because it's intertwined now. I think Zuckerberg is doing what's best for his business, which as business owners like, we can relate. But since his touches a global population, it's hard to, you know, there's just so many nuances to what's good or what's not and how, you know, different people want change. But I think from a marketing and advertising standpoint, there's so many opportunities within that ecosystem to thrive as a business because if you're not there, you're really missing out on a Lot of potential new customers and you know, just impacting your bottom line. Other platforms do really well, but they don't have the volume and the technological advances to reach the right people at the most cost effective way like say Medican compared to, you know, LinkedIn or Pinterest or, you know, others like that. So I think it'll be interesting to see what happens. But as you were, you're reading that question, I was like, wouldn't it be wild if Zuckerberg bought TikTok? Because historically Facebook either acquires or squashes something or copies it. Right. So right. It is copying TikTok in many ways. With the launch of reels like Stories was a thing and it took off but TikTok was really prominent so they came up with reels and then that took off. So I don't know, I think it'll keep us on our toes for a while and we'll have to pivot quite a bit. But I don't think meta's going anywhere anytime soon.
- [06:20]
Jordan Cooney
You opened up a lot of different topics there. I think the one I want to go down that I think is super important is understanding a little bit about meta ads. And you mentioned there that meta has a built technology that unequivocally helps advertisers be better at targeting. Can you share with our listeners a little bit about that? What is it about meta that works better than X or LinkedIn or other channels? And ultimately, I think the other big thing that I'm curious to get your perspective on is how is AI going to influence our ability to both leverage the targeting capabilities but also scale our advertising or marketing campaign efforts in social media?
- [07:03]
Akvila DeFazio
Yeah, so it's changed quite a bit. You know, meta's been around the longest out of the current, you know, most prominent social channels. A lot of people just willingly share their information there and it's on their devices, they're checking it multiple times a day and people are just giving, giving, giving all that data. So meta has accumulated that, but through legislation it's changed quite a bit to where there's privacy changes. And you know, just a couple of years ago we were able to target people based on really like niche interests and behaviors. We can still do that to an extent, but there's a lot of interest in behaviors that were removed. And you don't hyper segment as much because it doesn't work as well anymore. It's kind of one of those things like, well, if I target somebody that's, you know, in this zip code within, within a five mile Radius looking to buy newer used vehicle in the next three to six months or six to nine months, which was an option a few years ago. You can't do that anymore because you know, of privacy and different changes that have happened. But now, as someone who I love what I do, but I take it with a grain of salt and I like that control over picking my audiences. I knew that I was leaving people out potentially because I don't know, there might be somebody that is miscategorized based on data or there's some overlap. But in the last couple of years Facebook or Meta came up with Advantage plus audiences, which is AI based. So I don't have to do all that hyper segmenting anymore. I can and still do with some clients because as long as it's working and the data, until the data shows otherwise, I'm going to keep it running. But I'm also testing things in parallel to see, you know, what I can get from this audience or this campaign. So back to Advantage plus Audiences. Essentially, Facebook does the heavy lifting for you and it leverages a larger, broader opportunity pool. So you can have it just run broad with that enabling. But there's also an option to add a suggestion. And with that I've been doing a lot of rigorous testing since that came out of, you know, first party data. So Facebook and Instagram engagers to website visitors maybe leads other types of warm audiences to give it a little bit of a hint of who I'm trying to reach. And what I found, which makes sense is that the first party data works best because Facebook has the most and they don't disclose everything to us. So there's a lot of like gems in there that I might miss if I'm doing the manual targeting on my own. So by adding a suggestion with those engagers that actually outperforms adding your own things like email newsletter subscribers or website visitors by Pixel. So I recommend doing that and then focusing the rest on creative strategy which we talked about yesterday. But yeah, there's a lot of different ways to still target on Facebook, but it's really leaning into that simplified automated AI driven type of targeting. And it does a really great job finding the people that are most likely to accomplish the goal that you tell it to accomplish.
- [09:49]
Jordan Cooney
Are you seeing that when things work well in Facebook, they're easily repeatable through other channels? So if it works well in Facebook, will it work well in LinkedIn? If it works well in Facebook, it'll work well in X. I'm curious to get your perspective on that transferability of ads and media in these channels. I know we're here to talk about meta, but I think this is important for SEO content audience because as they partner with social members in their organizations or their agencies, I think it's important to be aware of what you should be listening to to utilize or learn from what is successful in a given medium.
- [10:31]
Akvila DeFazio
Yeah, that's a great question. So oftentimes we will take what we've already learned and has proven well in one platform to see if we can just, you know, get similar or better results doing that here as well as testing other ones that might be platform agnostic. But like yesterday I was on a call with one of our clients and I worked in paid search a long time ago, but my, my partner that does the paid search for this account, you know, we're talking about how on the social side we were targeting, it's for a shoe client and they we targeted people that are interested in cats. That worked really well for a cat specific product that we had that we haven't had that cat product but like we always think about it. She decided to test that in Google Ads and that cat Persona of people that are interested in cats or have cats was taking off for the last couple of weeks, which was like an interesting call out. But it does work for audiences, but I'd say more so for ads. So you know, creatives to using ad copy that will kind of just streamline that process and repurpose what we have, adjusted for character count if need be, maybe the tone for the platform. You know, sometimes things are a little bit more descriptive and social than it is in search. So we do take what we can and see if that works and if not, we'll try something else.
- [11:49]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless project with low success rates. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO Programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach, then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Previsible IO that's Pre visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [13:18]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And kind of coming back to meta and where meta is at today, specifically around the concept of audiences. I think this is an interesting opportunity where social media platforms have basically built their entire foundation out of these concepts of audiences. And all of us here on the search side really, I think have struggled to understand what that means because we don't do that. We target things based on keywords. What is a keyword to an audience? It's really hard to decipher that to some extent. I'm curious to understand your experiences with audiences and where you've seen in your career or your agency the ability to be very effective in an audience and have that transfer to other ways of doing marketing.
- [14:11]
Akvila DeFazio
The audience targeting is the one thing that evolves probably the most frequently. Like I've been doing this 17 years and Facebook for probably 15. But yeah, it's just becoming more and more hands off. So we don't have too much information that they give us anymore. We used to be able to run reports for audience segments and that used to be really insightful. So and then we can repurpose that for other platforms, but that's not available anymore and now we have to just rely on different site surveys. You know, we used to put things in UTM parameters that would give us understanding of the audience where I would import one and then tag everything. But then Facebook as of last year just said like you can't do that or you're going to get disabled. So every little way of like trying to figure out who that audience is has been challenging, at least on the advertising side of things. But again, like we can look at customer reviews, we can look at organic social comments on Facebook, Instagram, other platforms because that usually has a breadth of information of maybe who we're reaching or how we're impacting these people or what they think of our products. So I think that it's a multifaceted kind of way to be a detective and figure out who those people are. Given the limited resources that we have.
- [15:32]
Jordan Cooney
I want to reverse the question for a second. Have you seen things work in other places, like brand or other marketing areas, pr, that then have become super effective in rethinking the audience or rethinking the meta ads that you might use?
- [15:49]
Akvila DeFazio
I have not. I know we use a lot of media verbatims, whether it's somebody that a client's working with directly through their PR agency or if it's just inorganic. And then that works really well on ads because people like reputable sources or testimonials. But aside from that, I can't think of an example. Sorry.
- [16:06]
Jordan Cooney
No, that's okay. I think it's really interesting because so often we think about social media as the frontier channel in advertising. Right. And what I mean by that is it's like, okay, they're gonna be the first one to try something. They're going to be the first one to use this celebrity testimonial. They'd be the first one to use this client review of the product, and we're going to advertise it here. And then as that gains momentum, as that gains social popularity. Oh, then suddenly you see it on a billboard, you see it on a, you know, TV ad, you see it in a radio ad, and that happens so much today. But the inverse, I haven't really seen that to your point, as much in the market.
- [16:48]
Akvila DeFazio
Yeah, well, I'll keep an eye out for it. I'll send it over to you if.
- [16:51]
Jordan Cooney
I get it perfect. So, going back to meta and what's working at meta, any tips or recommendations for our listeners on successful meta ads and where meta is going in terms of their audience and targeting and how we can build a more perfect ad effort within meta.
- [17:12]
Akvila DeFazio
I think this is one of those rare instances where I say, lean into the machine and just let it target. Which historically was like, nope, can't tell me what to do. But I really see in the fruits of it, and I think it's going to get even more streamlined and our jobs will continue shifting to be more on the creative side of how do we continuously improve that. So then that way, instead of you telling who to target, that your ads are going to essentially do the targeting for you by resonating with the right people. And then the algorithms will figure out, okay, this person is into this and kind of do it in a lookalike fashion. So are you familiar with lookalike audiences? Yeah. So that was the winning type of audience for several years, like mostly during COVID and it was so effective. But something changed on the platform to where it doesn't work as well as it used to, no matter what type of percentage that you're doing, whether it's more narrowed down or for broader lookalike. But the advantage plus audiences that I had mentioned, it kind of works like a lookalike and it's a hybrid top. It's like a top and bottom funnel campaign all in one. So it'll reach that warmer audience if you give it a suggestion and kind of like feed it some data and then it's going to learn a lot quicker and give you the results that you're looking for. But then it's going to mostly branch out to prospective users. So in a way that is like a lookalike because you're finding people based on behaviors. But I wouldn't be surprised if lookalikes got phased out coming months.
- [18:43]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. In closing here for this episode, as we think about Meta ads and we think about the changing landscape, we talked about this a little bit in yesterday's episode that you noticed that cost was increasing in meta as TikTok was kind of being shut off intermittently. How should we think about cost? How should we think about ad budgets in the upcoming year, in particular as it pertains to Meta and how brands are investing in Meta as a channel?
- [19:16]
Akvila DeFazio
If you have historical data, keep track of that. It does increase year over year as more businesses come into it. I think what we saw over the last year, you know, with TEMU coming in and ever since the super bowl, they just dumped millions, maybe even billions of dollars in advertising. They're everywhere, right? Like it was really infiltrating our market. And we felt that on the advertising side because CPMs rose across the board and it was an unusual lift from prior years. So I think the, you know, the competition has really spiked. So it'll be interesting to see what happens this year with the new administration and what happens with TikTok. But it's important to keep diversified. So if one channel does get more expensive and you're getting less results, that you have others to kind of fill in those gaps. You know, you never know. But as long as you keep testing and, you know, trying different things to keep getting more results and then letting the platforms and the AI kind of just figure out how do we optimize optimally to get more results? You know, you're going to have to go through those swings of CPMs rising and getting less for your budget. But, you know, if you're in E commerce, you know, kind of how to roll through that in Q4, because that's just the temporary landscape of things changing. But I think you just, that's kind of the nature of business. No matter where you're advertising, it's just important to still find the right audiences and make sure that you have adequate budget. And if you don't have a large enough budget, then maybe you want to consolidate and just use your winners for now, especially as things get more expensive and disable something that's less effective, maybe more expensive for the acquisition costs. But there's a fine balance that's always going to, I don't know, I feel like balance is the wrong word because balance is dynamic. But you know, as long as you're, you're not letting things just go on their own and you can be a little bit more nimble with your campaigns and make those adjustments, I think that will be helpful in the coming, you know, future.
- [21:03]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Akvila Defazio from Akvertise for joining us. If you'd like, get in touch with Akvila, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can also contact her on X, where her handle is Viladefazio, or visit her company website, akvertise.com okay, thanks to.
- [21:28]
Podcast Announcer
Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which will answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.